To Have and Have Not

I always struggle to rate Hemingway's books, because there's aspects of them which I like, and also aspects of them which I detest. To Have and Have Not is no different.

The things I don't like: the excessive, name-calling racism, which is pretty heavy in this book. The hints of anti-semitism. The casual sexism. Hemingway is terrible with female characters. His women are shallow, vapid, and serve mainly as sexual partners. Many of them don't even get names. The only characters with any sort of nuance are the white men.

I have read that this novel was a couple of short stories stitched together and enlarged, and in places that's how it reads. It goes from first person to third person to omniscient POV, which is jarring. It starts off with show more a linear series of events, and turns into a pastiche of character sketches. It skips from the main story of Harry Morgan, boat owner, who becomes a smuggler between Cuba and Florida after a wealthy client fails to pay him for a weeks-long chartered fishing trip, to portraying various other characters who are part of the wealthy yachting class of the Keys. These other characters are not sympathetic; one rather despises their empty lives which are filled with debauchery.

Neither the rich, nor the revolutionaries, think twice about the damage they cause or the people they ruin in pursuit of their goals. But Harry also is at times vicious and violent even as he struggles to support his family. There are no heroes here, not even (or especially) Harry Morgan.

Hemingway's language is so oddly vivid, despite its simplicity. I can visualize everything, despite his spare prose style. The boats, the Gulf Stream, the environs of Havana and Key West. It's all there. The prose is clear and clean, making for a fairly fast read.

I'm not sure on his intent with this novel. Is it to compare and contrast the 'have's' and 'have-nots' at a time (the Depression) when that difference was stark and painful? Is it to show what desperate men are capable of (crime, murder, and revolution)? Much of the story is taken up with things like fishing, fighting, and drinking, pursuits that Hemingway himself devoted much time to. Maybe the story is just trying to show the many things that men do as they react to their circumstances. show less

It's said that Ernest Hemingway considered To Have and Have Not his worst novel, demonstrating that Papa was more self-aware than commonly believed. It's also said that he wrote it only to fulfil a contract, or because he needed cash. That's plausible, but it's no excuse. This novel is vile; it begins badly, and deteriorates from there.

A summary: Harry Morgan, like his piratical namesake, is a good man pushed into crime by the times and by bad luck. His luck just gets worse. Times are tough in Key West, at least for the locals. They're not so bad for all the rotten rich people in their yachts. Why are good men poor and bad men rich? The end.

To Have and Have Not is two short stories grafted onto a novel. It begins badly: as far as we can show more see at the outset, Harry Morgan isn't really a good man but a pirate -- thus, no doubt, the name. When we get through those stories into the novel proper, Harry suddenly grows a sympathetic wife and three daughters, for whom he's struggling to provide, and a bunch of dissipated rich people show up and take over the story. All this arrives too late; the whole thing seems disjointed, messy, as if Hemingway couldn't be bothered with rewriting it to unify the story.

This is also his worst writing -- it often reads as a bad parody of Hemingway, a screenplay for a cheesy noir film featuring stereotypical sailors and brassy blondes. The opening stories might not give you a sympathetic Morgan -- he's brutal, and casually racist -- but at least they're well written. Part 3, in which Morgan emerges as decent, is not.

Read The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and then this. It's hard to believe it's really the same writer. show less

A hard book from a hard time and a hard man. This is the third time I've read To Have and Have Not. More layers surfaced, or maybe I just remembered them after forgetting. Harry Morgan would have been a great serial detective in an earlier grittier Key West and EH a great detective writer. The casual crossings of the wealthy and the poor from a time when people did starve in this country. Before the option of corn syrup laden junk food. The casual use of the n word as part of conversation and not the N word used for conscious denigration immediately makes this one of EH's least popular books. But the hardness of the lives led and the unsparing gaze of Hemingway left me feeling, that with my peripheral vision, I caught a glimpse of a show more slice of life from another time and of how hard life could be. No happy endings here. After reading I held paperback and patted the attractive Scribner's cover, thinking that though it wasn't smooth, that it was a good read. A tell tale sign of a very good book. show less

A good book but nothing special. Hemingway doesn't seem to identify where he wants to take the story, and this is evidenced in his experimental (and somewhat jarring) switches between third- and first-person, and between stream-of-consciousness and detached description. Consequently, the reader has to work harder to engage with the story than one does for Hemingway's better works. Even at a modest 180 pages, it makes for a mildly exhausting read. This is a shame as the story holds some promise. In his circumstances and motivations, Harry Morgan is one of Hemingway's better anti-heroes (or 'code heroes', if you prefer) and you would think that rum-running/trafficking between the US and Cuba would be fertile territory for this writer in show more particular.

Thematically, it also seems disjointed, and though one can identify Hemingway's attempt to juxtapose the lives of the rich and the poor (the 'haves' and the 'have-nots' of the title), the execution lacks conviction. If there is a section which is hard-hitting, it is Chapter 24, where Hemingway relates the stories of a few newly-introduced characters. The despair is palpable: in a particularly chilling section, one character contemplates suicide by gun - those admirable American instruments... designed to end the American dream when it becomes a nightmare" (pg. 164) - which becomes even creepier when one recalls Hemingway's own tragic end. This chapter perhaps redeems the novel, but it is notable that Harry Morgan is barely involved in this part. The chapter seems like it was simply dropped into the story - indeed, it reads like something completely separate that one might find in a collection of Hemingway's short stories - and the overarching story of Harry seemed to lack commitment from the author. Hemingway later called the story a 'bunch of junk', but this is somewhat unfair. Alongside the junk there is some good stuff in To Have and Have Not, but be aware that you'll have to work to find it." show less

This would be a tough read for many. Impossible for some, in the current climate. Some of the characters in this are casually racist. Not much of the extreme variety, but more of the this-is-the-way-it-was assumptions of stereotypes applying across peoples and usage of racial slurs, as if it were their name. The other difficulty may come in structure. This is was originally a couple short stories and a novella that were stitched together to make a novel. It shows. Not least in the way that some parts are first person, some third, and not the same characters, but the lengthier parts focus on Harry Morgan, regardless of who's telling that part.

So, that's the forward, to warn away those who aren't interested in dealing with period show more Americana that isn't filtered. And wobbly-structured prose, too.

I now know that the Bogart movie had little to do with the book, beyond the hero being captain of a fishing vessel that is used for illegal activities. And this book is DARK. I mean, Jesus it's dark. Like and Edward Gorey cartoon about children dying. Dark.

The haves are almost entirely secondary characters. Not entirely antagonists, but certainly everything begins to turn bad for Harry Morgan because of being cheated by a "have". And Harry, our "hero", definitely one of the have nots, is no prince, himself. He's a good husband and a good provider to his kids, but beyond that he's capable of doing evil and does.

Eventually, everyone who screws others over in pursuit of his own needs (righteous or not) suffers in some way, regardless of wealth or position. There are no happy endings, here. There is death, suffering, and an ending bathed in tears. But that's the Great Depression, for you.

You'll get guns and killing and espionage and rebel douche-bags fighting the douche-bags in power and rich people and poor people and mostly they get what they deserve, whether you like them or not.

Harsh. show less

To Have and Have Not may be America's Depression Era equivalent of Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities. It was the best of times and it was the worst of times for those Americans at opposite ends of the economic spectrum. The Haves were the rich and idle vacationers in the Florida Keys, those with mansions and yachts, latter-day Rober Barons, partygoers. The Have Nots was the native Conchs, the Vets who drank themselves to oblivion at bars like Freddy's while getting into incessant fights with one another, the laborers of the Great Works program who worked for starvation wages. And then there is Harry Morgan - somewhere in between those extremes, possessing, at least in the beginning, both a house and a boat, but nevertheless desperate to show more keep it all together to feed his family. Morgan is the book's main character, though one could hardly call him the protagonist because he disappears from the narrative for long stretches (most likely because this novel was knit together from a collection of short stories). He epitomizes the novel's title, as a string of bad luck slowly demonstrates how one can possess, and be dispossessed, in rapid succession. And so this novel shows over and over again: marriages that are and then are not, lives that end in an instant, wealth that is accumulated over a lifetime at risk of being taken away by forces beyond one's control, love that is strong at one point that ends in disappointment and hatred, sexual desire that wanes. This book is ultimately at some level about the ephemeral nature of everything. show less

A book club pick ;)

The only Hemingway I’ve ever read was The Old Man and the Sea, and as a school assignment besides. So I voted yes with enthusiasm when my book club suggested we read this one.

I enjoyed the writing from the start. The descriptions of fishing were magnificent. And yet, why would you fight a beautiful creature of the sea, just so that you may win and it may die?

The dialogues are alive, rich and colourful, you can taste them.

“What happened to your arm?” the lawyer asked Harry. Harry has the sleeve pinned up to the shoulder.

“I didn’t like the look of it so I cut it off,” Harry told him.

I liked how Hemingway lets you catch glimpses of a different time and place, with a word here, or just a hint of a scent, a show more colour there.

Despite all this, I felt annoyed and bored. The women were mostly very silly and ridiculous. In general, there was a lot of “of its time” stuff in here, and I am still not sure how I felt about that. Also, I have seen this story before; I’ve met all these people before, in various reincarnations, in other books. Had this very short novel been better constructed, I would have been willing to overlook this. The POV changes and jumps between first and third person jarred, I felt. The cacophony of characters by the end added nothing to the narrative and just felt chaotic. They were not people, either, they were more like bugs under a magnifying glass – watch them crawl, oh, look, they picked up a piece of shit and are eating it, such weird bugs. I mostly just wanted the book to be over.

P.S. There might be better Hemingways out there. Recommendations, anyone? show less